United Kingdom

Rudyard Kipling

1865–1936

Born in Bombay in 1865 and a journalist in India before he was famous, Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, Kim and ballads such as “Gunga Din” and “If—”, in the rhythms of soldiers’ songs and street speech. His subjects are duty, adventure, loneliness and empire, which he both celebrated and showed at its cost, and his work remains hugely influential and contested. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.